SPORTS OF THE TIMES

SPORTS OF THE TIMES; Joe Namath, Joe Louis and the Berlin Wall

By IRA BERKOW

Published: November 12, 1989

The Berlin wall, which, spiritually if not physically, has been reduced to rubble in the last several, stunning days, has always been associated in my mind with the 1972 Olympics, and Joe Louis.

It was while covering the Olympics in Munich that I took off for a day - the day before, it happened, terrorists invaded the athletes' compound and murdered 11 Israeli team members - to visit Berlin, the pair of Berlins, that is, and to see the wall that had cut them in half.

Nothing could quite prepare one for the sight and wickedness of the wall, which was erected in 1961 by the East Germans to, in effect, imprison their citizens. The wall was 12 feet high, 27 miles long, topped with barbed wire, and protected, as it were, by a ''no-man's'' land on the East German side with another barbed-wire fence, German shepherds, sandbags and at least a pair of rifle-bearing soldiers at each of the 210 border watchtowers, including, of course, the best known, Checkpoint Charlie.

The wall separated apartment buildings in East and West Berlin that were so close residents could throw a ball from the window of one to the neighbor across the way. Not that the Easterners did, of course, since they could be shot for such a toss.

Everything in East Berlin seemed so gray, so glum, that even the beautiful, famous thoroughfare there, Unter den Linden (a guidebook noted that there were ''297 linden trees, count them for yourself'') looked wan and despairing.

A middle-aged woman there told me that many East Germans were resigned to life as it was because the older people had known only hard times for so long, and the young people, well, she said, ''they have their free schools and sports.''

Indeed they had their sports. The East Germans were developing some of the greatest athletes in the world. There were stories, some based on fact, some based on rumor, about the sports factories that turned out international champions, how high-tech they were both in engineering and medicine, perhaps even producing some mysterious performance-enhancing drugs.

Sports were terribly important to them, as they were to many of the Communist-bloc countries, since success at running and throwing and jumping would prove to the world just how superior their political system was. To others, though, this might just demonstrate that one and one does not equal two. The fact, after all, that Germany was an Olympic power in 1936 hardly proved the worth of Adolf Hitler's government.

In Munich in 1972, the East German athletes looked no different from many of the others, but they were in fact more skilled than most, capturing 20 gold medals.

Wolfgang Nordwig, for one, won the pole vault, the first time that that event had ever been won by anyone other than an American, and Renate Stecher won both sprints, the first woman to do so since Wilma Rudolph of the United States in 1960.

West Germany won 13 gold medals and, combined, the two German nations totaled 33, equal to the number of gold medals won by the United States.

Of all the Communist-bloc athletes, the East Germans seemed the most distant, the most programmed. There seemed a greater fear among the team's officials to allow their athletes to mingle with others. They appeared to have taken part of that Berlin wall and constructed it around the young men and women wearing the East German colors of black, red and gold on their swimsuits, their track suits, and their sweatsuits.

They always seemed less accessible than, for example, the Cuban boxers, several of whom I recall strolling about the Olympic Village, with one standing out, their great heavyweight boxing champion, Teofilo Stevenson, a large, well-sculptured fellow with a warm, almost shy smile.

And the East Germans seemed less approachable than, say, some of the Hungarians. One day, through an interpreter, I spoke with two Hungarian Olympians. One was Angela Ranky, who, in 1968, under her maiden name of Nemeth, won the gold medal in the javelin throw, and the other was Miklos Nemeth, a male javelin thrower. I asked each if they had ever heard of their American namesake, and counterpart thrower, the Hungarian-descended Joe Willie Namath. Neither had. When Miklos was told that Namath had been paid $10,000 to scrape off his Fu Manchu mustache for a television shaving-cream commercial, he was astounded. ''In my country,'' he said, ''what I would get for shaving my mustache is a big boot.''

But surely, one thought then, the young East Germans were not the grim automatons they seemed. One imagined that they could be just as joyous, just as excitable, just as thrilled with life as anyone else. Just as, of course, we see them now, as they dance in the streets and atop that contemptible wall.

And I'm reminded of a story that Joe Louis once related. He said he had been to West Germany a few years after the wall was erected.

''I wanted to see East Germany,'' he said. ''Well, they told me how sourpuss the Russians were. So me and a few others went to Checkpoint Charlie.

''A man on the other side recognized me and wanted to take my picture. This Russian soldier comes over and says no picture. The man told him who I was. The soldier throws his arm around my shoulder and he says, 'Take my picture, take my picture, too!' ''